First-time visitors might be surprised to find no towering peaks in the Peak District – the name is thought to derive from the Pecsaetan, an Anglo-Saxon tribe that settled in the area. But this vast national park, stretching across five counties – Derbyshire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire and Greater Manchester – is not short of drama, enfolding a landscape of two contrasting halves within its 555 square miles.
The Dark Peak, extending to the east and west and up into the far north, is all wild, heathery moorland, craggy tors and gritstone escarpments. Windswept and often shrouded in mist, this brooding land wouldn’t be out of place in a Victorian Gothic novel – indeed, the house that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is in these parts.
Further south, the landscape softens as you enter the limestone plateau of the White Peak, with its rolling hills and wooded dales dotted with small stone villages.
Both exert their own pull. The Dark Peak holds the iconic plateau of Kinder Scout, where in 1932 a mass trespass of 500 walkers on what was then private land prompted a change
